What Can Go Wrong? A Whole Lot! No More Twinkies!

Remember the Kingston Trio’s song Merry Minuet (way back in the late ‘50s), written by Sheldon Harnick?

They’re rioting in Africa. They’re starving in Spain. There’s hurricanes in Florida and Texas needs rain. The whole world is festering with unhappy souls. The French hate the Germans. The Germans hate the Poles. Italians hate Yugoslavs. South Africans hate the Dutch and I don’t like anybody very much! They’re rioting in Africa. There’s strife in Iran. What nature doesn’t do to us will be done by our fellow man.

Now comes a batch of 1,000 top experts, asked by Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum to predict the major risks facing the world in the coming year. They graph the risks according to a) likelihood, and b) impact. Here are all the things that can go wrong listed in order of importance: chronic budget deficits, water crises, systemic financial failure, climate change, weapons of mass destruction, food shortage, rising greenhouse gases, global governance failure, food shortages, severe income disparity, chronic labor market imbalance, unsustainable population growth… and I’ve barely got rolling. Makes Merry Minuet sound downright jolly!

But the experts have missed the real dinger. The world may not have ended on Dec. 21. But Twinkies did. Did you know Twinkies is going out of production? Bankrupt Hostess Brands is stopping production. Twinkies have existed for 82 years! Now, people are stocking up. Check out the price of a package of Twinkies on eBay. You won’t believe it. There is massive demand. Hopefully someone will come along and buy the brand. What killed Twinkies? The shift to healthful food.

I still think anything that makes you happy (and Twinkies does) is healthy. One more tip: Don’t read the World Economic Forum end-of-the-world risk map. Have a Twinkie instead.